US rice production systems achieve some of the highest rice yields in the world (FAOSTAT, 2015), and the US is currently theworld’s fourth largest exporter of rice, making up over ten per-cent of annual global rice trade volume (USDA Economic Research Service, 2015). Due to population growth and increasing ethnic diversity, the US’s global role as an exporter will be threatened unless rice production can be increased substantially. Given the yield plateaus seen in many high intensity rice production systems(Grassini et al., 2013), it is essential to be able to estimate Yp to answer whether this increase in production will require additional irrigated land, or whether the increased production can come from higher yields on existing land. Yet, to date, there has been no concerted effort to estimate US rice yield potential, partially because there are currently few well-validated models which can do so There fore, there is substantial interest in calibrating ORYZA for US production systems to evaluate and quantify Yp.